In Wittgenstein’s “Tractatus”, language has an unassailable grip on reality. It pictures the world but cannot say how it mirrors reality because we cannot get outside of language to see this mirroring. In his late philosophy, we find the antipode: language has no essence; language-games have different rules and different […]

In “New model island”, Alex Niven is looking for England and he can’t find it. The country existed as a nation state between the tenth and seventeenth centuries but he asks whether the idea of England today has any usefulness as a cultural cause.   Sean Sheehan   In the […]

A brief encounter with a Penan is burned into my memory. I was following a pathway, a mere stroll before darkness fell in the Kelabit Highlands in Sarawak where I was on a two-day trek.   Sean  Sheehan   He stepped out of the trees on one side, about to […]

The exhibition currently on show at the British Museum is called Troy: Myth and Reality but some plurals could have been used. Multiple myths and realities, some of an urgently contemporary kind, have created more than one Troy.   Sean Sheehan   An ancient city close to the northwest coast […]